Peace of Mind Organizing

Give yourself a power hour

27 April 2011

I had a client cancellation on Monday and found myself with about six hours of desk time that I hadn’t been expecting. Bliss.

Thanks to Mark Forster’s Superfocus task-management system (of which I’m an unabashed fan), I didn’t have to try to remember all the stuff I needed to do.

So I started working the list and got a couple of fairly major things done that had been lingering there forever. I looked at the clock and realized that I had about an hour before a phone appointment and I decided to give myself a Power Hour. I told myself that I would try to cross 10 things off my list in the next hour.

Oh my goodness, it was great! I worked through my task notebook, following the SuperFocus rules (meaning that I had to at least start at least one thing per page of my list — I had about 11 pages) and I got some really great things done. There were a couple of software programs and other resources I’d been meaning to look into that I made decisions on. There was an email glitch that had been plaguing me for literally months that I found a solution for. (Hooray!) By the hour’s end, I had completed ten tasks. (I kept track of how many tasks I’d accomplished with simple ticks on a scrap of paper.) I felt very accomplished and jazzed up when I finished the hour.

Power Hour is obviously good for ticking off one-off tasks that tend to accumulate. But it can also be useful for just getting started on some tasks. Something about the focus of the hour and the drive to achieve the goal of getting a certain number of tasks crossed off in that time was really motivating.

If you find yourself with an extra hour (or even a half hour) and a long to-do list, I urge you to give it a shot!

Treat yourself to a creative work session

25 April 2011

Maybe you have a germ of an idea you want to develop. Perhaps you have a problem you haven’t figured out how to find the solution for. Maybe you’ve planned out a project but haven’t found the time to actually work on it. Perhaps you just want to figure out which way is up.

Professional organizers (including me) love to tell clients to put themselves first, to actually schedule time in their calendars to work on meaningful stuff.

It’s a great idea. And here’s an even better one. It’s the Society of the Secret Playdate, the brainchild of my friend Maryann Devine of Smarts and Culture.

Maryann believes that great stuff happens in our head when we’re not really thinking about them. At the Society of the Secret Playdate sessions, you might work on the project or issue you’re wanting to work on, but then you can put it on the backburner and do some sort of creative endeavor (anything, really) while in the background your mind is working away at the project. Or perhaps it’s figuring a way through an obstacle. Or solving a problem.

Your hands are busy doing something creative while your mind does its own thing.

Here’s how the calls work. You connect with other people on the call and talk about what you’re going to work on during the playdate. You check back 60 minutes later and share your breakthroughs. (This brief description doesn’t do it justice. Please check out the Society of the Secret Playdate page.)

I love this idea. And one of the things I love most about it is that signing up you’re making the commitment to set time aside to do something you’ve been wanting to do. You place the call. And then you do your thing, because you know you’re going to report on it. I love that kind of gentle accountability.

Maryann is launching a new Society of the Secret Date membership program. If you get in on it soon, it’s only $13 a month for two 90-minute calls a month. (After May 24, it goes up to $19 a month, still a bargain, in my opinion.)

Right now, she’s offering a few sample calls so you can try it out. The first is full. But she’s just added one on Tuesday, May 3 at 3 pm eastern (I’ve signed up for that one!) and another on Saturday, May 14 at 3 pm eastern. Sign up here.

I just love creative people.

Keeping Mother's Day clutter-free

22 April 2011

Mother’s Day is one of those holidays that seems to invite clutter, in the form of gifts. I know I have a hard time coming up with gifts for my mother, who pretty much has all the stuff she needs. I don’t want to add another knick knack to her shelves, so I usually resort to flowers.

A couple of years ago, Atlanta professional organizer, Allison Carter, posted a fantastic post called Organizing Mom that details some services you can give your mom for Mother’s Day that will make her life easier without adding clutter. It’s definitely worth a read.

I found out about this oldie-but-goodie via another one of my favorite blogs, Unclutterer.

Smead video

20 April 2011

At the National Association of Professional Organizers’ conference in San Diego earlier this month, one of the exhibitors in the trade show, Smead Organomics offered professional organizers the opportunity to do a video for their YouTube channel extolling the virtues a Smead product.

Now, I love office supplies and Smead’s products are right up there so I had no trouble saying yes to that. The hard part was choosing what I wanted to talk about and I chose the fun new colors and patterns of their new file folders. I love that companies are getting creative with file folders.

Here’s the video (the still shot is kind of a bummer isn’t it…why are they invariably so bad?):

You can check out other organizers’ videos at Smead Organomics’ YouTube Channel

Help for living your dreams

18 April 2011

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I’m a raving fan of life coach Shannon Wilkinson. She’s my partner in Declutter Happy Hour and has crazy mad skills at helping people make things happen for themselves. A skilled hypnotherapist and Master Practitioner and Trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Shannon’s helped me immensely over the years.

Here’s a picture of Shannon, from her website.

I’m writing today because has a new website, Perception Studios and to celebrate she’s offering some freebies that you don’t want to miss out on.

• She has free monthly group coaching calls starting in May. Good news! There’s no limit to the number of folks who can be on the call.

• She’ll have a limited number of free one-on-one sessions available. She hasn’t rolled that out yet, but if you hunt around a little on her website, you can find a link for a free, 30-minute session. Or you can sign up for her email list on the right sidebar of her website and receive an email about the free sessions next week.

• As always, she offers a free Check in with Yourself audio, which can calm you down on a crazy day.

In addition, she’s rolling out a terrific one-on-one coaching program called You Creating You for people who want to turn their dreams into reality. The program is 18 hour-long phone sessions and you get to decide how long you want to take to complete those sessions (6 months to a year).

If you’ve dreamt of doing something that feels out of reach, Shannon can help you make it happen. Her work is that powerful.

One of my favorite organizing tools

11 April 2011

Today at the monthly meeting of the St. Louis chapter of NAPO organizers shared their favorite organizing tools. Those of us who attended the conference shared our favorite conference session. It got to me thinking what I would have shared, had I not gone to the conference.

So I thought I’d share here.

It’s a pop-up leaf container sold at hardware stores and places like Amazon. Here’s a picture of one, though it’s not the exact one I have.

The one pictured above is the Fiskars 9405 Kangaroo 30-Gallon Gardening Container. It sells for $24.99. (I got mine at Home Depot, for less than that, I think.)

I know it doesn’t look like an organizing tool. But I take it to clients’ homes for decluttering sessions. It can hold trash, recyclables, or charity donations. (It’s great for a closet clean-out.) I put a 39-gallon clear trash bag in it and it makes life so much easier, because we’re not constantly opening bags. We can just toss things in!

The best part is that it collapses flat and I can just keep it, and the bags, in my car’s trunk.

Do you have a favorite organizing tool?

Having fun, learning lots

8 April 2011

There’s little I like better than having fun while learning. And that’s exactly what I’m doing here in San Diego at the NAPO conference.

If you’re a professional organizer and you’ve never been to a NAPO conference, please make a promise to yourself that you’ll go to the next one, in Baltimore, March 21-24, 2012. Besides learning loads, you meet the most wonderful people.

When I went to my first conference in Boston in 2006, I could have never predicted that five years later, I’d have a picture like this taken with two of the most prominent POs in the industry.

That’s Geralin Thomas on the left and Standolyn Robertson on the right. If you watch Hoarders, you may well have seen these lovely ladies, who both appear regularly. Standolyn was president of NAPO from 2007 to 2009. She’s hot stuff. I’m so fortunate to call both of them my friends. (Geralin’s even one of my roomies.)

And isn’t the photo cool? NAPO had HDPhotoBooth there taking pictures. We’d stand in line at the trade show and get our pictures taken (they encouraged us to be goofy). They even printed a copy of each photo for us. If you’d like to peruse all the NAPO photos (there are hundreds), check ‘em out here.

If this post has inspired you to attend an organizers’ conference, I have good news. You don’t have to wait until 2012. You can attend the more intimate but equally fabulous annual conference of the Institute for Challenging Disorganization. It’s September 15-17, 2011 in Raleigh, N.C. The conference theme is Acquiring Minds: How We Think, Act, and About Possessions. It promises to be great.

Geralin and I will be there and, I hope, Standolyn too. Please join us!